Dynamic composition is an approach to design and image making where you establish a sense of movement and energy through various contrasts. Contrast is the primary key you need for creating impactful illustrations, photos and designs.
It’s by establishing contrasts that you control the viewer’s eye and create movement, hierarchy, and meaning.
Some of the contrasts are scale, shape, direction, and value. Value is the light-dark aspect of color. This is where the notan approach applies.
Originating in Japanese art, notan is a way to balance, or harmonize, light and dark elements in a composition. It’s the underlying value structure, or value map, of your design in which light shapes are massed together, and dark shapes are massed together, reducing the composition to two, or possibly three, colors.
This reduction allows you to observe and adjust shape, scale, and proportions within the picture plane to enhance the perception of movement and spatial dynamics.
The notan principle can be applied to any visual field or image, no matter what medium you’re using. It’s a useful tool to use when exploring composition options in small scale and laying out preliminary ideas. It’s also useful for portrait, figure and landscape painting to first establish the larger simpler areas of light and dark, and then develop the details of color and texture.
Using notan forces you to consider the entire composition at once and address the larger issues to avoid getting into the weeds of details too quickly.
While you can use the notan approach in creating finished works, it’s a stellar tool for working quickly at small scale to decide on a composition.
How to use the notan principle:
- Whether working from direct observation or from photographic reference, squint at the subject. This eliminates details and allows you to understand just a few values.
- Divide the subject/scene into 5–7 major shapes filled with black and white only
- Work loosely and broadly with your medium to lay in areas of dark. Use the side of your pencil, a broad tip marker, or a brush, and work quickly.
- Concentrate on the relative size and general shapes of the light and dark areas, and their positions in the picture plane. Keep things loose.
- One value, either light or dark, should dominate in the picture plane. They should not be equal in amount.
- Reduce the values in the observed image or space to two values for a stronger compositional read.
- Use flat color. Don’t attempt to layer, glaze, or gradate colors within the shape masses.
Notan sketch of a landscape scene, reducing the scene to two values.
Notan value map study for a portrait.